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MIT Weighs In On Energy Storage

By Francis Menton | Manhattan Contrarian | May 26, 2022

As I’ve been pointing out now for a couple of years, the obvious gap in the plans of our betters for a carbon-free “net zero” energy future is the problem of massive-scale energy storage. How exactly is New York City (for example) going to provide its citizens with power for a long and dark full-week period in the winter, with calm winds, long nights, and overcast days, after everyone has been required to change over to electric heat and electric cars — and all the electricity is supposed to come from the wind and sun, which are neither blowing nor shining for these extended periods? Can someone please calculate how much energy storage will be needed to cover a worst-case solar/wind drought, what it will consist of, how long it has to last, how much it will cost, and whether it is economically feasible? Nearly all descriptions by advocates of the supposed path to “net zero” — including the ambitious plans of the states of New York and California — completely gloss over this issue and/or deal with it in a way demonstrating total incompetence and failure to comprehend the problem.

And then suddenly appeared in my inbox a couple of weeks ago a large Report with the title “The Future of Energy Storage: An Interdisciplinary MIT Study.” MIT — that’s America’s premier university for matters of science and technology. The Report is 378 pages long, full of lots of detail, charts and graphs, mathematical equations, and technical jargon. It lists as authors some 18 members of the MIT faculty. Surely, if anyone can address this “net zero” energy storage problem competently, these will be the people.

Sorry. This is a product of modern American academia. MIT is as extreme left as any of them.

Having now spent about a week trying to wade through this morass, I am not impressed. The Report is an exercise by genius would-be central planners concocting enormously complex models that just happen to come to the results that the authors are hoping for, while at the same time they avoid ever directly addressing the critical question, namely what is the plan to get through that worst case sun/wind drought. Implicit in every page of the Report is that it is an advocacy document for the proposition that the U.S. should embark full speed ahead on crash “net zero” plans for our multi-tens-of-trillions-of-dollars economy without ever doing any kind of demonstration project to show it can work on any scale no matter how small.

You start to get an idea where this is going at the very beginning, when you come on page romanette v to a list of members of an “Advisory Committee” that appears to have given direction to the project. Members include John Podesta of the Center for American Progress, someone from the Environmental Defense Fund, an “Alternative Energy Research” guy from the Bank of America, an ex-World Bank guy (the World Bank being an organization dedicated to keeping poor countries from having access to energy that works), an environmental bureaucrat from the Massachusetts state government, several people from other alternative energy investors and environmental advocacy groups, and so forth. Clearly, this Report had to come to a pre-determined conclusion that energy storage issues do not pose any major impediment to net zero ambitions.

This being a product of left-wing academia, you can expect the usual touching faith in the ability of the federal government to solve all problems, no matter how intractable, by the magic of spending money out of the infinite federal pile. Thus, early in the Executive Summary, we find a recognition that the only battery storage technology currently being deployed in large amounts in commercial applications — namely Lithium Ion — cannot provide backup for periods longer than about 12 hours:

Li-ion batteries will continue to be a leading technology for EVs and for short-duration storage, but their storage capacity costs are unlikely to fall low enough to enable widespread adoption for long-duration (> 12 hours) electricity system applications.

OK then, what is the technology that will step up for the periods of a week or two that may need to be covered in a world without fossil fuels. From page xv:

To enable economical long-duration energy storage (> 12 hours), the DOE should support research, development, and demonstration to advance alternative electrochemical storage technologies that rely on earth-abundant materials. Cost, lifetime, and manufacturing scale requirements for long-duration energy storage favor the exploration of novel electro-chemical technologies, such as redox-flow and metal-air batteries that use inexpensive charge-storage materials and battery designs that are better suited for long-duration applications. (Emphasis in original).

The feds will “support research” into “novel technologies,” of course using the infinite money pile, and the technology will magically appear. And what exactly is the technology that will then emerge to rescue us? They have no idea:

While several novel electrochemical technologies have shown promise, remaining knowledge gaps with respect to key scientific, engineering, and manufacturing challenges suggest high value for concerted government support. Innovation in these technologies is being actively pursued in other countries, notably China.

You’ve got to hate those “knowledge gaps,” but clearly all that is needed to fill them is enough federal funding. And you can’t let those Chinese beat us!

Well, how about just using that ubiquitous element hydrogen, easily available through the electrolysis of water? They discuss that too:

[H]ydrogen produced via electrolysis can serve as a low-carbon fuel for industry as well as for electricity generation during periods when VRE [variable renewable energy] generation is low. . . . We support the effort that the DOE is leading to create a national strategy that addresses hydrogen production, transportation, and storage. In particular, the ability of existing natural gas transmission pipelines to carry hydrogen without suffering embrittlement, either at reduced pressures or if hydrogen is blended with natural gas or other compounds, remains an open question that deserves government-supported study by the DOE and the U.S. Department of Transportation.

Funny that private investors aren’t putting any real money into this “hydrogen economy” thing. That’s because to get hydrogen out of water is extremely costly, and once you have it, it is inferior to natural gas in every way as a source of energy for the people. It’s less dense, more dangerous, and more difficult to transport and store. But again, throw in some of the infinite pile of federal money and it will all magically work.

Many of the charts and graphs are very complicated and technical, but if you spend some time with them, you start to realize that they are an insult to your intelligence. I’ll give you just one of my favorites, this one from page 191. Here we are considering what the electricity generation system will look like for two regions, the Northeast (New York and New England) and Texas, in various low and no-carbon scenarios. The cutoffs of 0g, 5g, 10g and No Limit at the left refer to how much carbon emissions are allowed per kWh of electricity generated.

Thus at the top right we see what a zero-carbon scenario will look like for Texas. Supposedly, with about a 3 to 4 times overbuild of a system having only wind and solar generation, then we will only need battery storage for about 50% of capacity and about 11 hours duration. Really? Does anybody remember February 2021? Texas’s wind and solar generators produced at less than 10% capacity for days on end. Can a three times overbuild of wind capacity and 12 hours of battery storage solve that? The answer is no. Not even close. And you could get a wind/solar drought of a full week. If you have no fossil fuel backup, you had better have enough storage to cover that.

And if you take some time to study this chart (not saying that I would recommend that) you can find multiple other equally implausible assertions.

Bottom line: I’m not trusting anybody’s so-called “model” to prove that this gigantic energy transformation is going to work. Show me the demonstration project that actually works.

They won’t. Indeed, there is not even an attempt to put such a thing together, even as we hurtle down the road to “net zero” without any idea how it is going to work.

May 30, 2022 Posted by | Deception, Economics, Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | | Leave a comment

Fresh produce industry urges caution over gene editing

Grower’s association criticises “disconnect” between GMO-developing scientists and food industry

GMWATCH | May 26, 2022

An article in The Grocer reports criticism of the UK government’s “Genetic Technology (Precision Breeding) Bill”, which was introduced into Parliament yesterday.

It notes that both growers and campaigners are cautioning against the rapid adoption of new gene-editing technology.

The article quotes Philip Morley, technical executive officer of the British Tomato Growers’ Association, as saying that there had been a lack of consultation with the food sector on the government’s plans – leading to “a disconnect between the scientists, who are doing the research in their labs, and the growers, retailers and consumers”.

He said, “I know it is interesting and it sounds really sexy but this is a major national conversation we need to have if we are going to be pioneers in that technology, not just for fresh produce.”

Morley added, “This is the beginning, and is the foot in the door, the opening conversation and if we make a mistake now then that is a mistake that we live with forever.”

Morley said, “It is a huge topic, and it will involve every crop, every livestock sector, every human being ultimately when we get into the realm of gene editing humans.”

On the topic of GM tomatoes, a GM vitamin D-containing variety of which was hyped in the government’s publicity around the new bill, Morley stressed there were still many opportunities to look at natural processes in tomato production to boost nutritional values – something many growers were doing, particularly when it came to using light.

He told The Grocer that these natural explorations could potentially deliver far more benefits than any chemical intervention for human health.

Liz O’Neill, director of GM Freeze, is quoted as warning that unregulated gene editing is “a food crisis in the making” as “gene editing is GM with better PR”.

Soil Association policy director Jo Lewis told The Grocer that the decision to prioritise the bill over the food bill meant the government was “casting about for silver bullets”. She said, “We are deeply disappointed to see the government prioritising unpopular technologies rather than focusing on the real issues – unhealthy diets, a lack of crop diversity, farm animal overcrowding, and the steep decline in beneficial insects who can eat pests.

“Instead of trying to change the DNA of highly stressed animals and monoculture crops to make them temporarily immune to disease, we should be investing in solutions that deal with the cause of disease and pests in the first place.”

May 29, 2022 Posted by | Environmentalism, Timeless or most popular | | Leave a comment

Scientists genetically engineer mother hens to kill their own male chicks before they hatch

Transgenic chickens made with CRISPR gene editing are touted as an animal welfare boon – but could result in animal suffering and health and environment risks 

By Claire Robinson and Dr Michael Antoniou | GMWATCH | May 25, 2022

A concept patent has been filed for a method that includes the use of CRISPR/Cas-mediated gene editing to generate transgenic birds so that no male offspring are able to hatch. Israeli scientists led by Dr Yuval Cinnamon (named as an inventor on the patent) are proposing this method to be used in chickens, so that only female chicks will hatch, which will then go on to become laying hens for egg production.

Currently male chicks of egg-laying breeds are killed when young as they are of no use to the egg or chicken meat industries. Even then, hatching the male chicks and keeping them alive until they are killed is viewed by the industry as a waste of energy and other resources.

More seriously, the practice of killing the male chicks is an animal welfare issue. In this light, the transgenic CRISPR-edited chickens are being hyped as a boon for animal welfare, on the grounds (in the BBC’s words) that the technology could “prevent the slaughter of millions of male chickens in the UK, which are culled because they don’t lay eggs”.

But our investigation shows that such claims are disingenuous in the extreme. In fact, the technology forces mother hens to pass on a lethality (killer) gene, which is intended to kill all male embryos before they hatch from the egg.

The genes that are most reliably lethal, and therefore most likely to be used, produce highly toxic proteins. The hen should only produce the toxic protein under the influence of blue light, according to the patent. However, if the technology doesn’t work perfectly, the founder breeder hens and their egg-laying daughters could produce a toxin at low levels in their bodies, leading to health problems in these chickens. The male chick embryos killed successfully with the lethality gene could, depending on the particular gene used, effectively be toxic waste and could not be put into the animal feed supply – the current destination for unwanted male chickens. And the lethality gene could escape into the environment or into bacteria, and again, depending on the gene used, could endanger humans, animals, and wildlife.

Moreover, there appears to be no proof that the technology will work as intended, as there is no evidence in the public domain that a live transgenic breeder hen has actually been produced. The experiments described in the patent are all done on cells in test tubes/flasks (in vitro) or on the egg (in ovo).

In spite of all this, the European Commission has rushed to assure the German regulatory body, the BVL, that the egg-laying hens and their eggs are not GMOs and can therefore be sold without safety checks and GMO labelling.

The method

CRISPR/Cas gene editing is used in an SDN-3 (gene insertion) procedure to target integration of a transgene (a foreign gene, in this case, the lethality gene) into the male sex Z chromosome, with the egg-laying hen passing on that transgene to all male embryos of the next generation of chickens. On exposing the eggs to blue light, the lethality gene is activated and kills the male embryos before they hatch.

Lethality gene is likely to produce highly toxic protein

In order to ensure reliable killing of the male chick embryos at an early stage of their development, the lethality gene that the developers insert will have to be highly toxic. The various lethality-inducing proteins mentioned in the patent that are supposed to work by inhibiting growth/development (paragraphs 0156, 0157) or essential signalling pathways, such as “bone morphogenetic protein antagonist” or “RNA-guided DNA endonuclease enzyme” (paragraphs 0159, 0160), may be too uncertain in their effects.

Therefore the developer will almost certainly choose to use a known highly toxic element – such as genes encoding for diphtheria toxin or ricin toxin, both of which are specifically mentioned in paragraph 0158 as possible candidates for the lethal gene. The fact that the authors illustrate their concept using a diphtheria toxin lethality gene, albeit within the context of in vitro tissue culture cell experiments (Figure 24A), supports this line of thinking.

A gene encoding cholera toxin, another highly toxic poison, could conceivably be used, as the patent does not restrict the lethal gene to certain named types.

This raises the question of how “tight” and foolproof the expression of the lethality gene cassette is – in other words, whether it is completely silent as desired until activation by blue light illumination, or whether there is some low but significant expression prior to blue light illumination. Indeed, evidence of lethality gene expression leakiness is provided in Figure 13 of the patent (upper panels). It is common experience and knowledge that all transgenic systems are leaky – it’s only a question of degree. Thus the optogenic (blue light) activation system linked to the lethality gene cassette will almost certainly be “leaky”. This means that in the female founder breeding hens, even in the absence of blue light, the lethal gene may not be silent. So these female founder breeding hens and their egg-laying female offspring could express the lethality gene at a low level. This would mean that these hens would be producing a lethal toxin inside their bodies. As a result they could suffer health problems.

This possibility (which is far from unlikely) raises welfare questions about the health of the female founder hens and their female offspring. Their health status will depend on the nature of the lethality gene and to what extent it expresses in their bodies. This is a major ethical issue, beginning with the action of genetically engineering a mother hen to pass a killer gene to all her male offspring.

The lethal toxin-generating gene could escape into the environment or into bacteria. If it gets into bacteria, it could transfer from the bacteria into people or animals, with potentially serious consequences to their health.

Any male embryos that are killed using a toxic lethality gene will need to be treated as toxic waste and could not be used, for example, as animal feed, which is the usual destination for rejected male embryos or chicks in the non-GMO egg industry.

Proof-of-concept only

It is important to note that the experimental data presented in the patent application only attempt to demonstrate the feasibility of the various components of the method. They have tested all these components separately, but do not actually demonstrate that they can be brought together to produce a female transgenic founder chicken that can be used for breeding egg-laying hens. A search of scientific databases also failed to identify a transgenic breeding hen of the type that the method aims to generate. Thus based on current publicly available information, a transgenic live breeder chicken of the type described in the patent does not exist.

The patent is a method patent that tries to provide proof-of-concept and only describes in vitro and in ovo experiments. At most, these experiments show that exposure to blue light can activate gene expression as desired in vitro and in ovo. They also show killing of tissue culture cells using the lethality gene system. They show protein synthesis inhibition from expression of the diphtheria gene (but not strictly cell or embryo death) in ovo – but not through activation by blue light. They show killing of tissue culture cells with a diphtheria or caspase (cell death-inducing) genes, but again, not via blue light activation. At best they show that in ovo injection of a growth inhibitor protein (noggin) can arrest embryo development at an early (blastomere) stage. No doubt the idea is that if you can express these toxic proteins from a gene via blue light illumination, then it could work. But there’s no proof that it does.

EU Commission claims the laying hens and their eggs are not GMOs

The EU Commission wrote to the German Federal Office of Consumer Protection and Food Safety (BVL) in July 2021, stating that the laying hens resulting from this genetic modification process and their eggs are not GMOs and would not fall under the EU’s GMO regulations.

The EU Commission reaches its conclusion based on the supposed absence of the transgene (or fragments thereof) in the female hens. However, and crucially, the EU Commission is grossly misinterpreting the law. The EU definition of a GMO is not an organism that contains transgenes, but an organism “in which the genetic material has been altered in a way that does not occur naturally by mating and/or natural recombination”. The law does not state that transgenes have to be present in order for an organism to be classed as a GMO.

There is no proof that the female hens in question are free from such unnatural genetic alterations, as described in this legal text. Therefore the Commission appears to be acting against the law.

Do the female laying hens contain transgenes?

Let’s suppose for a moment that the EU law was worded completely differently from how it is, and that it does define a GMO as an organism containing transgenes. Even in this imaginary scenario, it is not valid for the Commission to assume that the female hens do not contain unintended transgenes in part or in whole. Scientific evidence in plants and human cells shows that fragments of foreign DNA from the gene-editing tool can inadvertently integrate into the genome during the gene editing process and end up scattered across the genome.

In the case of the transgenic chickens, in order to produce the founder hens, integration of the lethality gene is targeted into the male sex-determining Z chromosome, using the CRISPR/Cas gene-editing tool. But this process may not go as planned. While the lethality gene cassette may end up in the intended location on the Z chromosome, fragments of the lethality gene or the plasmid DNA molecules encoding the CRISPR/Cas tool may also integrate in other regions of the genome – that is, on chromosomes that will be passed down to both male and female chicks. As a result, both the founder hens and their female egg-laying offspring could inadvertently contain fragments of the CRISPR gene-editing tool and/or fragments of transgenes in their genomes.

There appears to be no published evidence showing that this procedure does not give rise to inadvertent transgene fragment integration and that the resulting transgenic founder hens and their female offspring are free from such foreign DNA. Moreover, existing evidence suggests that this is highly likely to happen.

The way to find out if it has happened is to do a genomics (whole genome sequencing) analysis of the founder hens and their female egg-laying offspring. But this basic investigation may not at present be possible if, as appears, the desired transgenic founder hen does not exist in actuality.

So until evidence is provided to the contrary, we can assume that fragments of the CRISPR gene-editing tool and/or fragments of transgenes may have integrated into their genomes. If this is the case, then the founder hens and their offspring, the female egg-laying hens, will be transgenic, as will be the eggs of the laying hens. Therefore even under a hypothetical law that defined a GMO as an organism that contains transgenes, all three would have to be labelled as GM. The Commission would therefore be acting against this hypothetical law – and against its own incorrect interpretation of the law – in stating that the laying hens and their eggs are not GMOs.

Under EU law, the egg-laying hens and their eggs are certainly GMOs, though not because of the possible presence of transgenes. As Testbiotech explains, “In the case of the laying hens, they are the direct female offspring (F1) of the transgenic chickens. They inherit (regardless of whether the transgene works as supposed) genetic material from the mother hens which also will be transferred to the eggs. Thus, there can be no doubt that the laying hens and the eggs produced, are products of GMOs and consist of GMOs. As can be seen with oil, starch or sugar produced from GM plants, it is the production process which is the decisive criterion for the implementation of EU law and not the presence of genetically modified material [e.g. transgenes] in the end product.”

The Commission’s action in sending the BVL a letter stating that these animals are non-GMO shows not only its misinterpretation of EU law, but also that it accepts GMO industry self-declaration of transgene-free status, without requiring any proof.

Unintended genetic changes

The gene-edited founder breeding hens are likely to have unintended changes in their genome, such as insertions, deletions or rearrangements of DNA, at both the intended edit site (on-target) and at other locations in the genome (off-target). This could lead to disturbances in patterns of gene function which could lead to health or welfare issues in the chickens. Even if at the site of insertion of the lethality gene, all is as intended without any unwanted mutations, unintended genetic alterations at off-target sites will be passed on to the egg-laying daughters of the founder breeding hens.

It is not known how carefully the developers will look for such unintended effects – only long-read whole genome sequencing and subsequent “omics” molecular analysis of the chickens will suffice – and how carefully they will try to breed them out. Any unintended effects that are not bred out will be passed down to the egg-laying hens. Without strict regulation requiring such examinations, it is uncertain that they will be undertaken.

What is the Commission actually deregulating?

In sum, there appears to be no available information on how any live GM chickens were generated and indeed if they were generated at all. So the Commission appears to be acting beyond its expertise, as well as beyond its mandate, in its rush to deregulate something that may not work; may not exist in a utilizable form, and if it does, will likely not be as free from transgenic material as the Commission assumes; and may cause serious public health and environmental problems, as well as severe health or welfare issues for the chickens themselves.

Alternatives are available

While unwanted male chick embryos are commonly killed by gassing them or grinding them up alive, more humane alternatives are available. These alternatives seem to be preferable to a potentially dangerous gene editing route using lethality genes.

One such alternative technology is egg screening using the Sellegt method, which enables producers to sex the chick embryos at day nine of incubation and select out the unwanted males. Eggs produced using this method are already being sold by supermarkets under the label “Respeggt”, which promises that the eggs are “free of chick culling”. Other already-available sex determination methods are described on the Wikipedia page on in ovo sexing.

It may be argued that the patent for the gene-edited birds allows male embryos to be killed using exposure to blue light before the nine-day point at which the Sellegt method becomes viable – though this raises the question of whether a nine-day-old embryo is any more sentient than a 1-8 day-old embryo and therefore if there is any moral gain in using the gene editing system because it theoretically allows for earlier killing.

The problem with this argument is that the patent hedges its bets and also claims that the killing point can be any time between one day and the full 21-day egg incubation period. So it cannot be assumed that killing a male embryo with a lethality gene is in any way more humane (on the grounds that it takes place at an earlier stage) than existing alternative non-GMO methods – and the latter do not result in a potentially toxic product.

This patent is under consideration by the European Patent Office but has not yet been granted. In deciding whether to grant patents, patent offices must consider three things: novelty, a non-obvious inventive step, and utility. If the toxic lethality gene is only activated at 10–21 days of incubation, as is provided for in the patent, then the Patent Office would be justified in refusing the application, as the technology described is not an improvement on existing technologies and therefore has no utility.

Dual use chickens: A more humane and sustainable option?

For those who object to any killing of male chick embryos on the grounds of animal welfare or waste, but wish to see chicken meat production continue, another option is available that would enable the raising to maturity of the males. That is dual use chickens, in which the females serve as egg layers and the males as meat. Such chickens are commonly available but are not commonly used in the chicken meat industry because males do not put on weight as quickly as females. So by separating out breeds between egg laying and meat-producing, productivity is arguably being prioritized over animal welfare and sustainability.

Conclusion

In conclusion, this gene editing application appears to be
* Of unknown efficacy in producing the intended gene-edited live chickens.
* Potentially dangerous for the chickens themselves, raising animal welfare concerns.
* Potentially dangerous for humans and other animals, who may be exposed to escaped lethality genes expressing highly potent toxic protein products (e.g., diphtheria, ricin, or cholera), due to the envisaged large scale use of this technology. These toxin-encoding lethality genes and their toxic protein products could also put at risk the environment as a whole.
* Ethically questionable. The developers are genetically engineering a mother hen to pass a killer gene to all her male offspring when there are already-available alternatives, such as egg sexing early in the incubation period.
* Of doubtful utility, since it seems not to provide any more humane or efficient system of preventing the birth of male chicks than is already available via other technologies.

In addition, the egg-laying hens and their eggs are GMOs under EU law. Therefore the European Commission should correct its advice to the German regulator and state that these GM products should be subjected to a risk assessment and GMO labelling.

May 29, 2022 Posted by | Environmentalism, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , , | Leave a comment

CDC study purporting to find substantial protective effects for school mask mandates fails to replicate

eugyppius – May 29, 2022

Last year, the CDC published a paper comparing Pediatric COVID-19 Cases in Counties With and Without School Mask Requirements. The authors looked at data from 520 United States counties, concluding that “Counties without school mask requirements experienced larger increases in … case rates … compared with counties that had school mask requirements.” Corona astrologers and face diaper fetishists everywhere have used the findings to argue for forcing healthy children who are at no risk to wear fasks masks for multiple hours each school day.

More county-level data on American infection rates and mask mandates has since become available, and two Toronto scientists have taken the opportunity to replicate the study, looking now at 1,832 counties. In a turn of events that will surprise nobody, they find that the larger dataset shows that mask mandates actually do zero, and that prior findings were almost surely an illusion.

Here are masked vs. unmasked case rates, using a smaller data pool similar to that from the CDC study:

Week 0 is the week of school reopening after the summer holidays.

Yes, the maskless counties seem to do worse! Yet the Toronto authors point out that the original CDC study only considered infection rates through the second week after schools reopened, which turned out to be “exactly the peak of school case numbers for [their] sample of counties.” This obscured the fact “that cases quickly declined in later weeks and did so faster in counties without mask mandates.” Even the smaller sample used by the CDC study, in other words, showed no difference in masked vs. unmasked counties by the six-week mark.

The replication, with a much bigger dataset, meanwhile, showed that maskless counties never led infections at all:

Note that, in the larger sample, the maskless start out with lower rates of infections and catch up; in the smaller sample, they started out with higher rates which collapsed more quickly.

The authors note that the CDC study, by ending their analysis on 4 September 2021, effectively excluded counties with a school-start date after 14 August, which entailed an oversampling of southern states. I’ll fill in the blanks here: Counties in the American south tend to have fewer school mask requirements, and also to experience late summer infection spikes related to high temperatures and extensive reliance on climatisation.

Although masks have become the most clearly discredited measure deployed against SARS-2 (which is saying something), they just won’t go away. Even in places that have lifted all Corona restrictions, a great many people continue to mask in public, and it seems likely that many countries – Germany among them – will retain vestigial mask requirements indefinitely, probably for years. Masking is a totally unsupported superstitious practice that does nothing against viral infection, and yet for precisely this reason, no amount of evidence will ever convince the maskers to stop.

May 29, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , , , | Leave a comment

Australia begins to reap what it has sown. It’s grim.

By Joel Smalley | Dead Man Talking | May 27, 2022

Apparently, it’s really difficult for our ONS to produce deaths by date of occurrence by sex and age until 7 months after year end. This means we won’t get any reliable death data for 2021 until July this year.

Fortunately, Australia is a little more timely with their data releases so we can get a little insight from down under.

Looking at both sexes and all ages, it is clear that things have gone really wrong for Australia since the week ending 11th April 2021. Between then and the end of Feb 2022, there have been 16k excess deaths.

There have been less than 4k COVID deaths in that same time with most of those coming since Sept 2021.

So, much like every other country of the world, Australia has had more COVID death since the COVID vaccine was introduced in Feb 2021 and substantially more excess death from other causes.

By the end of the period, more than 90% of the adult population has been jabbed.

What if we break it down by sex and age?

In the over 75s, the pattern is quite consistent, regardless of sex. There was modest excess death during 2020, the year of the plague, followed by significant excess starting exactly on 11th April 2021, just under two months after the mass COVID vaccinations began.

In the 65 to 74 year olds, the men have been dying at a steady excess pace since the start of 2020 with no obvious inflection like the older age groups. The women, on the other hand, were dying at a slightly slower pace but caught up after an inflection on 25th April 2021, two weeks after the older age groups.

Things to start to get interesting in the 45 to 64 year olds. The men have been dying less than expected since the start of 2020 but stop their decline when vaccination starts and rally in early September 2021.

Conversely, the women seemed to have a little spike Feb to May 2020 when COVID was pandemic before also declining in the run up to mass vaccination. But the biggest anomaly is that their death rally starts on 18th April, 1 week after the oldest groups but 1 week before the 65 to 74s and a massive 5 months before the men.

I’m not normally one to speculate, but in the absence of any better quality data from the expert public health authorities, I’m going to have a stab at an explanation – there are substantially more female health care workers, especially in care homes, who would have been “prioritised” over their male peers which is why they die from the jab sooner.

I could be wrong.

May 29, 2022 Posted by | Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | | Leave a comment

What Really Happened in the Pandemic

By Justin Hart | Rational Ground | May 26, 2022

Every year humans endures a “flu season” – a period denoting the high-water mark of that year’s wave of respiratory viral pathogens. Believe it or not we still have strains of the 1889 Russian flu, the 1918 Spanish flu, the 1957 Asian flu, the 1968 Hong Kong Flu, the 2009 H1N1 virus – all these various strains of nasty bugs rear their head every single year.

In late 2019, a new “novel” pathogen appeared on the scene – a bug from the “Coronavirus” family (“corona” describing the spike-like structure of the particles.) The official title was SARS-CoV-2. SARS = “severe acute respiratory syndrome”; CoV-2 = “Coronavirus 2.” This particular virus can cause a disease called COVID-19 (“Coronavirus Disease 2019”). The disease is thought to have originated in China and found significant human-to-human transmission. It is thought to be “novel” because prior infections of other pathogens do not seem to create anti-bodies to tackle this newfound disease within the human body.

Officials raised alarms about the potential mortality witnessed from COVID-19. Governments across the world scrambled to address and protect their populations from what quickly became a pandemic. Efforts ranged from stringent to downright authoritarian. Results were mixed to say the least. In early 2022, it was thought that SARS-Cov-2 and COVID-19 would join the panoply of viruses and diseases we experience during the annual ebb and flow of life.

That’s the short sterile version of what transpired.

Here’s what actually happened:

  • Global elites had ramped up significant efforts to reshape the world to address a host of inequalities and imagined boogeymen like climate change.
  • These global elites were bolstered by a host of corrupt institutions which included the WHO (“World Health Organization”), big pharmaceutical companies, and world wealth and health players like Bill Gates.
  • With the emergence of a new virus these groups pounced at the vulnerable moment to put their plans into action and retool the world with a host of proposals – this was known as The Great Reset. The Coronavirus response was just the first sortie in this plan.
  • Governments across the world, under the threat of serious mortality (real or imagined), caved to the plan of action which utilized never-before imagined cram downs on individual rights, massive financial expenses, and enhanced authority overhauls to set the stage for a shift of power.
  • Free speech, right to assembly, right to bodily autonomy, representative government all fell within months of the first COVID-19 cases announced in almost every country.
  • This newfound power and framework allowed this movement to latch on the decaying carcass of fragile democracies, societal empathies, and eggshell-walking politicos anxious about upcoming elections.
  • Unprecedented global lockdowns of populations disrupted the entire flow of commerce and relationships.
  • Trillions of tax dollars flowed into the coffers of every connected and corrupt institution under the guise of “protecting” the global populace from this apocalyptic pathogen.
  • Disrupted businesses were “bought” off with zero-cost loans and grants to keep employees onboard and keep the money flowing so as not to destroy the economies all at once.
  • A massive global testing regime was set up to catch the widest number of COVID-19 infections possible. The chosen test array (the PCR test) could pick up remnants of a virus at 5 days after infection or even 75 days.
  • Hospitals were designated as the first point of care ensuring a massive wave of anxiety and alarming centralization of power still felt today.
  • Deaths were counted with the widest-possible latitude ensuring a prominent psychological impact at every turn prompting policies mirroring population concerns.
  • Governments bought and paid off new entities to ensure compliance. Threats of fines and operational shutdowns were made if new agencies failed to meet expectations.
  • A global deterrence was crafted to ward off any pre-hospitalization treatments. The endgame was focused on the ultimate prize: a “revolutionary” vaccination framework thought to be the next generation in global medicine and health.
  • An unprecedented wave of funding and government collusion was established to roll out a vaccine across the world.
  • Government mandates ranged from coercive inconvenience to full-on house arrest. You could lose your job, your bank account, and your freedom in one fell swoop.
  • Simplistic mechanisms of mask wearing were instituted as an outward sign of faith in the “new normal.” Politicians could then wipe their hands of outcomes by pointing to lack-of-use of such procedures.
  • Children were targeted for ripe propagandist approaches ensuring that most vulnerable parts of our society were utilized as a bludgeon against anyone going against the grain.
  • Wave after wave of virus variants proved a great excuse when vaccines didn’t perform as expected.
  • Strategic gaslighting was employed by health officials to distract from their massive failures.
  • War followed to cover up the disaster.

All of this was designed to latch onto a virus that many assert has unnatural origins. The ramifications of a man-made virus set loose upon the world by accident or on purpose should frighten us more than the virus itself. Someone was playing god and it appears they are just getting started.

My book, Gone Viral: How Covid Drove the World Insane comes out in September.

May 29, 2022 Posted by | Book Review, Civil Liberties, Corruption, Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , , | Leave a comment

The Corruption of the World Health Organization

BY DAVID BELL | BROWNSTONE INSTITUTE | MAY 27, 2022

Global Health’ is confusing. A few short years ago community participation, disease burden, resource allocation and human rights dominated its decision-making processes. Causes such as improving childhood nutrition, empowering minorities and protecting girls from enslavement and mutilation were acceptable battles to fight.

Here we are in 2022: Coercion, exclusion, impoverishment and big business are in, whilst highlighting those other areas is ‘free-dumb’ or some subversive form of denialism. Same people, same organizations, same funders, just a change of the tide.

As with any historic shift towards fascism and colonialism, it takes a considerable group effort to ignore reality to keep this tide moving but humans, especially in hierarchical structures, have always been up to the task. We still are.

The World Health Organization (WHO) and its staff are currently engaged in two overriding priorities that are excellent examples of humanity’s proficiency at living such lies:

  1. They are pushing the COVAX program to mass-vaccinate most of humanity, at an unprecedentedly high cost for any global health program, against a virus to which nearly all potential recipients are already immune.
  2. They are working towards an expansion of their powers to manage infectious disease outbreaks, with the expressed intent of instituting the same measures used for the first time in the response to COVID-19, but more quickly and more often.

These are strange priorities for public health professionals, because these same staff of the WHO all know the following to be true:

About COVAX: 

  • Their COVAX slogan, “No one is safe until everyone is safe”, is completely illogical for a vaccination program unless it is purely transmission-blocking, as it implies that those already vaccinated are not protected.
  • The current vaccines against COVID-19 do not halt or greatly slow transmission, and require boosters to maintain efficacy against severe disease.
  • Covid-19 is associated very strongly with old age, with mortality risk being several thousand-fold greater than in the young. Yet, more than half the people in sub-Saharan Africa – a major target of COVAX, are 19 years old or younger.
  • Most people in sub-Saharan Africa and India (so probably everywhere) now have post-infection immunity, which is equal to or more effective than vaccine-induced immunity, and not significantly enhanced by subsequent vaccination.
  • Vaccinating people in low- and middle-income countries with two doses, for a rapidly-waning benefit, would cost several times more than any other infectious disease program (up to 10 times the total spend on malaria).
  • The human resources devoted to the largest vaccination programme ever undertaken would further reduce healthcare access for other diseases whose burdens are currently increasing.

About lockdowns:

  • Health is, by the WHO’s own definition, a state of ‘physical, mental and social well-being, not merely the absence of disease and infirmity,’ meaning that harming mental and social health is a negative for overall health.
  • The WHO noted that border closures, prolonged school closures, and quarantining of health people would be likely to do more harm than good in their 2019 pandemic influenza guidelines.
  • It is standard public health knowledge that poorer people tend to die younger, and poorer countries have higher infant mortality and reduced overall life expectancy.
  • The ‘lockdown’ response to Covid-19, a disease with severity predominantly confined to old age, killed hundreds of thousands of children, and will continue to do so due to increasing poverty, malnutrition and rising teenage pregnancy rates.
  • The lockdown response also:
    • Is driving millions of girls into child-marriage (which many in the humanitarian community would previously have characterized as institutionalized rape).
    • Is increasing child labor.
    • Interrupted over a billion children’s schooling, leaving millions never to return.
    • Reduced routine childhood vaccination, to diseases that do heavily impact children.
    • Reduced case-finding and treatment access for tuberculosis and HIV/AIDS, leaving more infected people in the community untreated, to transmit to others and die.
    • Greatly increased inequality between a rich controlling few and a rapidly expanding disempowered poor, reversing years of poverty reduction.

The whole humanitarian and global health world knows these facts. Even bankers can figure this out; the International Finance Facility considers that twice as many children died from lockdowns as died from Covid-19, while the Bank of International Settlements, key to international finance, recognizes that gross domestic product is a major determinant of long-term health.

Yet the WHO, as a public health body, acts as if unaware, even ignoring their standard age-dependent metrics for disease burden as they seek to justify policies that will increase child deaths to target a disease predominantly of the unwell elderly.

The WHO and other health organizations predicted lockdown harms, and have documented them since early 2020, whilst working to ensure they will happen more often. In 2018, they reiterated support for a horizontal approach emphasizing community control and empowerment in the ‘Astana Declaration,’ whilst in 2022 they advocate for a vertical approach based around population control and mass coercive use of pharmaceuticals. Human rights seem no longer a thing to be seen supporting, but the contradictions involved here are nothing short of remarkable.

We often see organizations as ‘beings’ in themselves, but of course they are the sum of the individuals that staff them; humans who are making choices every day, every hour, about what they are doing and what they should do next.

In this case, it appears the WHO’s staff are comfortable with ensuring the people they were charged to support are increasingly impoverished and their rights and health autonomy removed. They are not just resigned to the abandonment of basic public health principles and ethics, but actively working to undermine them.

Perhaps we would all do that to protect income, pensions, healthcare benefits and an attractive and genuinely interesting lifestyle of Swiss lakes, business-class travel and good hotels. We cannot criticize people who perpetuate such harm without recognizing much of ourselves in them.

Pressure to conform is strong and maintaining integrity carries risks. We all have families, jobs and lifestyles to protect. The belief of many that the ‘humanitarian’ sector was somehow different should by now be shattered. That is a good thing, as illusions do not help us and we need to recognize the historical reality that preserving personal comfort has often entailed throwing others under the bus.

When the tide turns, the easiest approach is to turn with it. As a staff member of an international agency said to me recently – ‘the money is going into pandemic preparedness, you have to accept and go with it.’

As an insight into humanity, this response is a disappointing one. We are always poorly served by cowardice. But recognizing how things are, and that help is not coming from those paid to do so, will strengthen the resolve of the rest of humanity to move forward without them, taking the future into their own hands. As, according to orthodox public health, they should.

David Bell, senior scholar of Brownstone Institute, is a public health physician based in the United States. After working in internal medicine and public health in Australia and the UK, he worked in the World Health Organization (WHO), as Programme Head for malaria and febrile diseases at the Foundation for Innovative New Diagnostics (FIND) in Geneva, and as Director of Global Health Technologies at Intellectual Ventures Global Good Fund in Bellevue, USA. He consults in biotech and global health. MBBS, MTH, PhD, FAFPHM, FRCP

May 28, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Corruption, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , , | Leave a comment

Swiss Daily: Wind Park Destruction Of 1000-Year Old Untouched German Forest Exposes “Absurdity Of Green Energies”

Unsustainability in the name of “sustainability”

By P Gosselin – No Tricks Zone – 28. May 2022

Lately we’ve been reporting on what many people are calling one of the greatest environmental felonies in Europe: the deforestation of the 1000-year old Reinhardswald, known as the “fairy tale forest”, in order to make way for largescale industrial wind parks to produce “green” energy. Proponents claim  the wind parks will save our environment and climate. Clearing the forests has already commenced.

We reported on this environmental crime here, here and here.

Only wind parks count

At the Swiss NZZ daily, Christian Saehrendt writes on the “absurdity” of clearing one of Europe’s last remaining intact forests to make way for monster wind parks.

In the Reinhardswald, which covers an area of around 200 square kilometers, there are centuries-old oak trees, a highly developed natural biodiversity that is home for example to rare wild cats and populations of white red deer – a balance which has taken 1000 years to establish. But now it’s all being industrially raped, gangbang-style, by crony, greedy bastards under the guise of environmental virtue. It’s a grand swindle that in normal times would have everyone enraged.

But these are not normal sane times. The NZZ reports: ” Yesterday, trees were planted as climate savers; today, only plastic rotor blades count.”

“To free Germany from Russian energy imports”

The Swiss daily adds:  “This spring, the authorities in northern Hesse approved the construction of a wind farm with at least eighteen 240-meter-high wind turbines in the middle of this forest area, causing widespread consternation.”

The densely wooded and rural region around Kassel, where the Documenta world art exhibition is being held again this year, has actually traditionally relied on tourist marketing as “fairy tale country” and is served by the “German Fairy Tale Route,” In the past, this has also gone down well with overseas tourists, especially Asians,” writes the NZZ. ”

Wind park proponents defend the deforestation of one of Europe’s remaining virgin forests by claiming that only sick areas of the forest are being cleared away and that the turbines will “free Germany from the clinging grip of Russian energy imports”….and save our climate for generations to come.

“The Federal German Ministry of the Environment recently permitted the construction of wind turbines in natural reserve areas. In addition, species protection is to be weakened,” the NZZ accurately reports. “The initiative ‘Windpark-Reinhardswald-dagegen’ declared: ‘The so-called treasure house of European forests – is ruined for decades. We are horrified.’”

Not to worry… let them go to fake forests

“While the real, historically grown fairytale forest outside the city is being cut down, artificial substitutes are being created within the city. For example, Kassel’s civic society has been fighting for months over the redesign of the Brothers Grimm Square, which is conceived in the form of a “fairy tale forest” of pine trees and shrubbery – whereby at best a light miniature forest on a traffic island can emerge.”

The NZZ adds: “In Kassel’s Grimm Museum – the ‘Grimmwelt’ – which will again be a Documenta site in the summer, an artificial forest has already been built in, its thorn hedge atmosphere created by those green and vertically arranged brushes familiar from car washes. Even in these local events, a mega-trend of our time becomes visible: the desensualization and media filtering of our experience. Nature is increasingly staged and unreal. City groves instead of primeval forests, artificial worlds instead of nature, while the landscape outside becomes more and more inhospitable and loses its face.”

May 28, 2022 Posted by | Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity, Timeless or most popular | | Leave a comment

The Fauci/ COVID-19 Dossier. The 2002 SARS-CoV Patent.

By Dr. David Martin | May 28, 2022

Background

Over the past two decades, my company – M·CAM – has been monitoring possible violations of the 1925 Protocol for the Prohibition of the Use in War of Asphyxiating, Poisonous, or other Gases, and of Bacteriological Methods of Warfare (the Geneva Protocol) 1972 Convention on the Prohibition of the Development, Production, and Stockpiling of Bacteriological and Toxin Weapons and Their Destruction (the BTWC).

In our 2003-2004 Global Technology Assessment: Vector Weaponization M·CAM highlighted China’s growing involvement in Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) technology with respect to joining the world stage in chimeric construction of viral vectors. Since that time, on a weekly basis, we have monitored the development of research and commercial efforts in this field, including, but not limited to, the research synergies forming between the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the National Institutes for Allergies and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC), Harvard University, Emory University, Vanderbilt University, Tsinghua University, University of Pennsylvania, many other research institutions, and their commercial affiliations.

***

The National Institute of Health’s grant AI23946-08 issued to Dr. Ralph Baric at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (officially classified as affiliated with Dr. Anthony Fauci’s NIAID by at least 2003) began the work on synthetically altering the Coronaviridae (the coronavirus family) for the express purpose of general research, pathogenic enhancement, detection, manipulation, and potential therapeutic interventions targeting the same. As early as May 21, 2000, Dr. Baric and UNC sought to patent critical sections of the coronavirus family for their commercial benefit.1 In one of the several papers derived from work sponsored by this grant, Dr. Baric published what he reported to be the full length cDNA of SARS CoV in which it was clearly stated that SAR CoV was based on a composite of DNA segments.

“Using a panel of contiguous cDNAs that span the entire genome, we have assembled a full-length cDNA of the SARS-CoV Urbani strain, and have rescued molecularly cloned SARS viruses (infectious clone SARS-CoV) that contained the expected marker mutations inserted into the component clones.”2

On April 19, 2002 – the Spring before the first SARS outbreak in Asia – Christopher M. Curtis, Boyd Yount, and Ralph Baric filed an application for U.S. Patent 7,279,372 for a method of producing recombinant coronavirus. In the first public record of the claims, they sought to patent a means of producing, “an infectious, replication defective, coronavirus.” This work was supported by the NIH grant referenced above and GM63228. In short, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services was involved in the funding of amplifying the infectious nature of coronavirus between 1999 and 2002 before SARS was ever detected in humans.

Against this backdrop, we noted the unusual patent prosecution efforts of the CDC, when on April 25, 2003 they sought to patent the SARS coronavirus isolated from humans that had reportedly transferred to humans during the 2002-2003 SARS outbreak in Asia. 35 U.S.C. §101 prohibits patenting nature.

This legality did not deter CDC in their efforts. Their application, updated in 2007, ultimately issued as U.S. Patent 7,220,852 and constrained anyone not licensed by their patent from manipulating SARS CoV, developing tests or kits to measure SARS coronavirus in humans or working with their patented virus for therapeutic use. Work associated with this virus by their select collaborators included considerable amounts of chimeric engineering, gain-of-function studies, viral characterization, detection, treatment (both vaccine and therapeutic intervention), and weaponization inquiries.

In short, with Baric’s U.S. Patent 6,593,111 (Claims 1 and 5) and CDC’s ‘852 patent (Claim 1), no research in the United States could be conducted without permission or infringement.

We noted that gain-of-function specialist, Dr. Ralph Baric, was both the recipient of millions of dollars of U.S. research grants from several federal agencies but also sat on the World Health Organization’s International Committee on Taxonomy of Viruses (ICTV) and the Coronaviridae Study Group (CSG). In this capacity, he was both responsible for determining “novelty” of clades of virus species but directly benefitted from determining declarations of novelty in the form of new research funding authorizations and associated patenting and commercial collaboration. Together with CDC, NIAID, WHO, academic and commercial parties (including Johnson & Johnson; Sanofi and their several coronavirus patent holding biotech companies; Moderna; Ridgeback; Gilead; Sherlock Biosciences; and, others), a powerful group of interests constituted what we would suggest are “interlocking directorates” under U.S. anti-trust laws.

These entities also were affiliated with the WHO’s Global Preparedness Monitoring Board (GPMB) whose members were instrumental in the Open Philanthropy-funded global coronavirus pandemic “desk-top” exercise EVENT 201 in October 2019. This event, funded by the principal investor in Sherlock Biosciences and linking interlocking funding partner, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation into the GPMB mandate for a respiratory disease global preparedness exercise to be completed by September 2020 alerted us to anticipate an “epidemic” scenario.

We expected to see such a scenario emerge from Wuhan or Guangdong Province, China, northern Italy, Seattle, New York or a combination thereof, as Dr. Zhengli Shi and Dr. Baric’s work on zoonotic transmission of coronavirus identified overlapping mutations in coronavirus in bat populations located in these areas.

This dossier is by no means exhaustive. It is, however, indicative of the numerous criminal violations that may be associated with the COVID-19 terrorism. All source materials are referenced herein. An additional detailed breakdown of all the of individuals, research institutions, foundations, funding sources, and commercial enterprises can be accessed upon request.

Note

This work was supported, in part, by a fund-raising effort in which approximately 330 persons contributed funds in support of the New Earth technology team and Urban Global Health Alliance.

It is released under a Creative Commons license CC- BY-NC-SA. Any derivative use of this dossier must be made public for the benefit of others. All documents, references and disclosures contained herein are subject to an AS-IS representation. The author does not bear responsibility for errors in the public record or references therein. Throughout this document, uses of terms commonly accepted in medical and scientific literature do not imply acceptance or rejection of the dogma that they represent.

Click here to read the full document.

Copyright © Dr. David Martin, Dr. David Martin, 2022

May 28, 2022 Posted by | Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , , , , , | Leave a comment

Mass Extinction of Climate Inquiry at the BBC

By Chris Morrison | The Daily Sceptic | May 27, 2022 

Guess which article was written by a BBC journalist:

One statement… claims: “We are indeed experiencing the greatest wave of extinction since the disappearance of the dinosaurs.” While that may (or may not) be true, the next sentence is spuriously precise: “Every hour three species disappear. Every day up to 150 species are lost’”… The International Union for Conservation in Nature (IUCN) has listed 801 animals and plant species (mostly animal) known to have gone extinct since 1500. But if it is really true that up to 150 species are being lost every day, shouldn’t we expect to be able to name more than 801 extinct species in 512 years.

…

Nearly one third of all species are now endangered due to human activities… the extinction of species is now happening between 1,000 and 10,000 times quicker than scientists would expect to see… more than 142,000 species have been assessed [by the IUCN] and 29% are considered endangered, which means they have a very high risk of extinction… it is hoped that an agreement can be reached to stop what scientists are calling the ‘sixth mass extinction’ event.

Correct, whichever one you chose – both articles were produced by BBC writers. But what a difference a decade makes. The first quote came from an article written in April 2012, while the second appeared a few days ago. The first article by Richard Knight reports the statement about a great wave of extinction. But it correctly shows it as a claim, and the author then goes on to examine whether it has any validity. The evidence suggests that it does not.

The second article, from Esme Stallard, takes a different tack. The now-familiar klaxon of ecological Armageddon is sounded, with hair-raising claims simply repeated without any attempt made to question them. The claim that species are going extinct 1,000 to 10,000 times quicker is linked to a blog called Global Forest Watch. The extinction quote on the first page of the blog does not attribute it to scientists – that appears to be the addition of Stallard. Far from querying the figures, it seems an attempt is made to give them added provenance.

Meanwhile, the idea that we are suffering a sixth mass extinction is little more than the invention of climate activists, led in this case by agitprop operations like the World Wildlife Fund (WWF). The claim certainly isn’t backed up by dead bodies. The mass extinction scare was debunked about five years ago, at a time when it was starting to gain popular traction, by the Smithsonian palaeontologist Doug Erwin, who dismissed it as junk science. Erwin is one of the leading experts on the End-Permian mass extinction, 252 million years ago. “Many of those making facile comparisons between the current situation and past mass extinctions don’t have a clue about the difference in the nature of the data, much less how truly awful the mass extinctions recorded in the marine fossil record actually were,” he said. He went on to note that people who claim we are in a sixth mass extinction do not understand the logical flaw in their arguments. It is a “way of frightening people” since if it was actually true, “then there’s no point in conservation biology”.

The number of widespread, durably skeletonised marine species that have gone extinct, notes Erwin, is close to zero.

So how did the BBC, and most other mainstream media, move so quickly from a ‘mission to explain’ to outright green activism and, by default, the promotion of the political control-and-command Net Zero project? As with the Covid experience, we see a marked recent shift in the acceptance of alarmist official messaging and, hand-in-hand, a push for even harsher enforcement measures for the political agenda of the day. ‘Follow the science’ seems only to apply to the work of approved scientists. Social media companies are only too happy to go along with restrictions on permissible speech, while opponents are routinely traduced with terms such as covidiots, anti-vaxxers and climate deniers.

To your correspondent’s way of thinking, the true climate denial lies with the acceptance that the science is settled. Green alarmism has a long and continuing history of failed predictions, but the activists struck gold in the 1980s and 90s when temperatures rose after a fall from the 1940s. Global cooling was quickly substituted by global warming. It had a good run, but the writing was on the wall when the temperature stopped rising from around 1998 to 2010. And the slowdown continues with a current pause lasting another 91 months. Surface datasets can be adjusted, in many cases quietly upwards by 30%, pauses massaged away and record hot years proclaimed, but the jig is looking up. Bad weather can be rebranded as ‘extreme’, and mass extinctions declared to be underway, but their value is limited over time since the claims are easily debunked.

But the show can be kept on the road if the science surrounding carbon dioxide and its precise warming effect in the atmosphere is deemed settled and beyond dispute or debate. Despite 50 years of scientific work, nobody knows what happens to the global temperature if the levels of CO2  double in the atmosphere. Wild guesses that temperatures will rise by 6°C are fed into climate models, which use the politically correct data to produce constantly wrong forecasts. Many scientists suggest natural variations are far more important in determining climate, but their views are ruthlessly ignored under the ‘settled science’ mantra. Again, we see something similar over Covid. Despite being signed by many eminent medics, the lockdown sceptical Great Barrington Declaration was widely ignored in the mainstream media.

The BBC started to shutdown climate science debate early in 2006 when an internal conference, partly led by the environment analyst Roger Harrabin, attempted to redefine the editorial balance between competing scientific hypotheses. Natural forces were to be downplayed in favour of the unproven suggestion that warming is caused mostly by humans burning fossil fuel. This, despite the fact that it is generally known that humans only produce 4% of all CO2 that enters the atmosphere every year. The editorial rot started slowly at first – we can see that in 2012, work was still being published that questioned some of the extreme environmental claims being made. But by 2018, the Director of News and Current Affairs Fran Unsworth demanded that interviewees sceptical about man-made climate change “were no longer to be invited regularly”. In fact, we can read that as never.

Ten years ago the BBC was still questioning exaggerated or false climate claims. These days it is making them. As I noted on Wednesday, Justin Rowlatt claimed in his “Wild Weather” programme that deaths from warmer global weather were rising. In fact they are falling. His Panorama producer justified the statement on the grounds the deaths were “cumulative” – as though a running total of deaths would ever go down.

No need for an increase in the licence fee, then. The BBC’s income is always going up, cumulatively.

Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor

May 28, 2022 Posted by | Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | | Leave a comment

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